The Help

Angry stories come out, of white men who’ve tried to touch them. Winnie said she was forced over and over. Cleontine said she fought until his face bled and he never tried again. But the dichotomy of love and disdain living side-by-side is what surprises me. Most are invited to attend the white children’s weddings, but only if they’re in their uniforms. These things I know already, yet hearing them from colored mouths, it is as if I am hearing them for the first time.

WE CANNOT Talk for several minutes after Gretchen’s left.

“Let’s just move on,” Aibileen says. “We don’t got to... count that one.”

Gretchen is Yule May’s first cousin. She attended the prayer meeting for Yule May that Aibileen hosted weeks ago, but she belongs to a different church.

“I don’t understand why she agreed if . . .” I want to go home. The tendons in my neck have locked tight. My fingers are trembling from typing and from listening to Gretchen’s words.

“I’m sorry, I had no idea she gone do that.”

“It’s not your fault,” I say. I want to ask her how much of what Gretchen said is true. But I can’t. I can’t look Aibileen in the face.

I’d explained the “rules” to Gretchen, just like with the others. Gretchen had leaned back in her chair. I thought she was thinking about a story to tell. But she said, “Look at you. Another white lady trying to make a dollar off of colored people.”

I glanced back at Aibileen, not sure how to respond to this. Was I not clear on the money part? Aibileen tilted her head like she wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly.

“You think anybody’s ever going to read this thing?” Gretchen laughed. She was trim in her uniform dress. She wore lipstick, the same color pink me and my friends wore. She was young. She spoke evenly and with care, like a white person. I don’t know why, but that made it worse.

“All the colored women you’ve interviewed, they’ve been real nice, haven’t they?”

“Yes,” I’d said. “Very nice.”

Gretchen looked me straight in the eye. “They hate you. You know that, right? Every little thing about you. But you’re so dumb, you think you’re doing them a favor.”

“You don’t have to do this,” I said. “You volunteered—”

“You know the nicest thing a white woman’s ever done for me? Given me the heel on her bread. The colored women coming in here, they’re just playing a big trick on you. They’ll never tell you the truth, lady.”

“You don’t have any idea what the other women have told me,” I said. I was surprised by how dense my anger felt, and how easily it sprang up.

“Say it, lady, say the word you think every time one of us comes in the door. Nigger.”

Aibileen stood up from her stool. “That’s enough, Gretchen. You go on home.”

“And you know what, Aibileen? You are just as dumb as she is,” Gretchen said.

I was shocked when Aibileen pointed to the door and hissed, “You get out a my house.”

Gretchen left, but through the screen door, she slapped me with a look so angry it gave me chills.

TWO NIGHTS LATER, I sit across from Callie. She has curly hair, mostly gray. She is sixty-seven years old and still in her uniform. She is wide and heavy and parts of her hang over the chair. I’m still nervous from the interview with Gretchen.

I wait for Callie to stir her tea. There’s a grocery sack in the corner of Aibileen’s kitchen. It’s full of clothes, and a pair of white pants hangs over the top. Aibileen’s house is always so neat. I don’t know why she never does anything with that sack.

Callie begins talking slowly and I start to type, grateful of her slow pace. She stares off as if she can see a movie screen behind me, playing the scenes she’s describing.

“I worked for Miss Margaret thirty-eight years. She had her a baby girl with the colic and the only thing that stopped the hurting was to hold her. So I made me a wrap. I tied her up on my waist, toted her around all day with me for a entire year. That baby like to break my back. Put ice packs on it ever night and still do. But I loved that girl. And I loved Miss Margaret.”

She takes a sip of her tea while I type her last words. I look up and she continues.

“Miss Margaret always made me put my hair up in a rag, say she know coloreds don’t wash their hair. Counted ever piece a silver after I done the polishing. When Miss Margaret die of the lady problems thirty years later, I go to the funeral. Her husband hug me, cry on my shoulder. When it’s over, he give me a envelope. Inside a letter from Miss Margaret reading, ‘Thank you. For making my baby stop hurting. I never forgot it.’”

Callie takes off her black-rimmed glasses, wipes her eyes.

“If any white lady reads my story, that’s what I want them to know. Saying thank you, when you really mean it, when you remember what someone done for you”—she shakes her head, stares down at the scratched table—“it’s so good.”

Callie looks up at me, but I can’t meet her eyes.